Wednesday (continued)

The rest of Wednesday morning was spent on a walking tour of Jaffa with two Israeli grad students: Yoav (Jewish) and Wassim (Palestinian/Moslem). The event was organized by by Da'at Travel through (Beit?) Daniel, the Reform Jewish center in Tel Aviv.

The time was fascinating and certainly controversial within our group. We are not of one mind about the experience. I speak for myself here. (It's my rabbinate and I'll blog if I want to, blog if I want to....)

At one point we stood in a park at the top of Jaffa, an open and sculptured public space, looking down on the old port and looking north into Tel Aviv. A city occupies space that was once orange orchards and dunes, and new and beautiful Tel Aviv neighborhoods exist where Manshiya -- the largest Palestinian 'suburb' of Jaffa -- had been. The park itself had been a Jaffan community before the Palestinian uprising against the British. On Tuesday we'd absorbed the romance of the miraculous growth of Tel Aviv through the exquisite and emotional images of Reuven Rubin's artwork. All that made the impact of this session more confusing and conflicted for me.

So many narratives exist simultaneously, layered on top of each other, just as new homes and communities are built on the foundations of old ones. The fulfillment of the Zionist dream is also the story of Palestinian loss. The erasure of Manshiya creates/allows the growth of wonderful Tel Avivi neighborhoods, filled with countless stories and families, where many Jewish artists are flourishing and beautifying the world.

As I heard it, much of the pain our group felt and expressed came from a desire to create a logic and order out of the chaos and disorder of history. Injustices don't cancel each other out, they just pile up. The aspirations of Palestinians for their communities are neither more nor less noble than the Zionists' desires for self-determination and salvation (as Mordecai Kaplan would understand it).

Time spent weighing the pain of one refugee people against another is ultimately, in my opinion, time wasted. My pain doesn't disappear automatically when someone else's pain rises to the surface. We recognize emet, rachamim, tzedek -- truth, compassion, and justice -- as attributes of God. Seder, order, is not. We would do better to collect stories than to order them and trim the loose ends to fit neatly, because stories are extensions of our humanity, and we bleed when we slice them to size.

After a soul-restoring lunch at Dr. Shashuka's (deservedly famous) Restaurant in Jaffa, we spent some time at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, possibly the first unprofitable appointment of our trip. What we probably really needed was a nap. The collection had some beautiful works (also one hilarious room of "old masters" that included a Rubens, a Gainsborough, and a bust of Rasputin, I kid you not), but we were tired, and the docent was imho unworthy of a major museum.

We spent a lovely hour from 5:30-6:30 with Noam Shmuel, a young director on the staff of the Cameri Theatre. He wasn't totally prepared for the group, but the improvised session was better for us than a more polished presentation would have been. We saw a number of the Cameri's performance spaces, got to watch the L'Chaim scene from their hit production of "Fiddler," and hear about the economic, artistic, and logistical challenges of producing theatre (and building a future theatre-going audience) in Israel.

The group (thank you!!!!) heeded my repeated urgings to over-caffinate or by whatever means necessary summon hidden resources of energy for our 6pm appointment with Ruth Calderon, arguably world's most charismatic Talmud scholar. At Alma, her college of Torah lishmah (Torah study for its own sake), cohorts of Israel's leading TV scriptwriters, rock musicians, artists, journalists and internet writers -- "the cultural creators of current day Israel" -- have been studying Jewish text intensively in 2-year sessions. The words, stories, principles, and "magic" of the text have been seeping into their work. Shout "Halleluyah," somebody.

Alma's way of bringing Jewish learning and the arts together would have pleased both Mordecai Kaplan and Judith Kaplan Eisenstein no end. I feel it's what Reconstructionist Judaism would be if we could get past both (a) the American Jewish lack of Hebrew literacy and (b) what Ruth described as America's "protestant Judaism" as opposed to Israel's "Catholic" one. I experience Ruth as a mega-star. I was unsure whether to shake her hand or ask her to sign my t-shirt. I may be smitten, but I'm not crazy. She's just that luminous.

I had a fab late dinner with Byeager Blackwell, my former boss at the Israeli Opera, while at least four people from our group went back to the Cameri and saw (and somehow stayed awake through????) Fiddler, comped in by Noam.

I'm a day behind in blogging, but I won't be able to report on Thursday's adventures until at least tomorrow. In the meantime, we're at the Dan Panorama in Haifa, and the Mediterranean looks just fine from this window, too.